Image by acidpolly via Flickr

Tomorrow morning Julian Assange will start his final legal battle over extradition to Sweden in the UK Supreme Court. The liberal media that were once in bed with him however passed judgement a long time ago during his 400+ days under house arrest without charge.

In fact, it seems certain liberal journalists have now declared some kind of media fatwā on both Assange and anyone who dares stand-up for him.  Even I, hardly a high profile target, was recently called an “Assange apologist” by renowned American investigative journalist Heather Brooke who slurs his supporters as “Assangistas”. Meanwhile her former colleague at The Guardian David Leigh has called Assange “some sort of dirty, flaky hacker from Melbourne”.

Other liberal journalists have joined in on the Assange gang-bang. The Guardian’s Nick Cohen has dismissed him as nothing more than “an attention seeker”. In The New York Times,  John Burns described him as “On the Run” and “Trailed by Notoriety”. And in Sweden, Aftonbladet’s Dan Joseffson called him “a lonely and broken neo-liberal who wants to tear down democracy.”

How things have changed. Little more than a year ago, all of the above journalists and their newspapers welcomed Assange with open arms to publish the War Logs and Cablegate. In the case of Aftonbladet, they were even about to sign-him to write a regular column. Now they think he stinks – some of them quite literally. Is this really a particularly strong delayed reaction to Assange’s alleged hygiene or it something to do with the fact that the most powerful government in the world and its corporate backers would like to re-write the law books and charge Assange – and some of those that allegedly collaborated him with him – with espionage?

The way the liberal mainstream have abandoned Assange says a lot about how it operates when power really hits back – it becomes very reactionary. This is because the same corporate interests that own the liberal media, either directly through ownership or through advertising, are under attack from organizations such as WikiLeaks. In liberal societies, a certain amount of dissent has to be tolerated to give the impression of a critical and democratic mainstream media that holds power to account. But there are permissible limits to this dissent as the case of Assange and WikiLeaks has shown.

Some of the journalists and publications involved are also understandably worried. If the US can re-write the rulebook and somehow extradite Assange on “espionage” charges for merely giving whistleblowers a voice, then Leigh, Brooke, Burns and all the other newspapers that worked with him can theoretically be implicated as well.

This hostility from the liberal end of the media spectrum in the West means it’s no surprise that Assange has had to turn to Russia Today in order to continue his work. Assange will surely be under no illusions that he won’t have the freedom to critically discuss anything that compromises Russian interests when working for the Kremlin’s propaganda arm. But he will have the freedom to go beyond what the Western mainstream media are willing to discuss on their own doorstep.

Which only reiterates why WikiLeaks, and projects like it, are still so desperately needed in the West to extend the acceptable spectrum of dissent in the mainstream media.

(28/1 13:00 Update: The statement is now offline maybe due to high traffic number or because Spanair have withdrawn it. As I recall, it said those needing domestic flights in Spain would be offered domestic flights on the aforementioned airlines for around €60, European flights for around €80 and International flights €100 although I can’t be sure about the exact details. According to this story, the deal is restricted to Iberia: “Iberia has announced a flat fare of $79.15 (€60) for Spanair ticket holders on Spanish mainland and Balearic routes, $118.73 for routes to the Canary Islands and $131.92 for any European route.)

It seems that Spanair never recovered from the tragic crash in 2008 at Madrid airport where 154 people lost their lives. Shortly after, SAS sold the airline to avoid financial repercussions although they still hold stake in it and are said to be planning to plow around a billion Swedish kronor into Spanair to alleviate the losses.

(28/2 13:00 Update: SAS have announced the bankruptcy will cost them 1.7 billion Kronor or $252 million)

In recent weeks, Spanair were desperately trying to reach a last ditch agreement with Qatar Airways to save them after the Generalitat (the regional Catalan government here) refused any further loans to it. It seems like Barcelona based low cost carrier Vueling had an inkling this was collapse was in the pipeline as Flightglobal reports that they were already training their pilots to fly planes with the same engines as Spanair. It also implies that this bankruptcy might open the way for former FC Barcelona president Ferran Soliano to take over as Chief Executive of Manchester City as he previously said he’d never leave his post as President of Spanair. If Manchester City are to become the FC Barcelona of England, maybe this is where it all starts.

I’ve traveled several times with Spanair since 2008 and it did seem like they were making a real effort to improve their service and restore confidence after the crash. If you’re affected by this bankruptcy, I hope you manage to find an alternative arrangement. The latest news on the situation is here in Spanish in La Vanguardia.

There’s also a number to ring in Spain for help: 902 13 14 15.

However, if you’d rather Google didn’t collate or track all your activities across the various Google products that you use, there are a few simple measures you can take to stop it.

• Sign-out of your Google account. This only works when using certain Google products. For some, such as YouTube, you can use the service without being signed-in. Obviously, this method isn’t much good if you want to check your Gmail. If you want to see whether you are signed-in or not, check the top-right of your screen.

• Create multiple Google accounts. You could create one for each product that you use so that your activities or data are limited to one account at a time. You can then sign-in with multiple accounts in one browser although for some services, you can only sign-in to one Google account per browser at any one time which could become a bit messy and annoying.

• Customise your Google privacy settings. Google does offer a privacy customization page where you can tweak your settings for various apps. However, it isn’t clear whether these will still work once the new privacy policy takes effect on March 1st.

Read the rest of my OnSoftware piece about How to stop Google tracking you across services.

This post was published on OnSoftware.

The recent closure of Megaupload highlights the risks of using a cloud based service to backup and store data. Of course, backing-up your data to an external hard drive isn’t without risks but there is one that’s significantly reduced – the threat of losing access to your data due to sites being shutdown. Of course, an authority such as the FBI could always confiscate your external hard drive but the risk is much less.

We’ve already compiled and compared a list of other cloud backup solutions so here are five of the best desktop backup alternatives for Windows and Mac:

TimeMachine (Mac):

Apple’s easy to use discreet backup solution. Constantly backsup your data without slowing down your Mac so that you can effectively “go back in time” and restore files and data. Note however that some people have found it unreliable at times – it may start-off well but may become erratic over time.

SuperDuper! (Mac):

SuperDuper! creates exact clones of your Mac’s hard drive so you have a full backup of all your data, including permissions, user profiles and private settings. Simply select the target and destination drives and start backing up. You can specify exactly which files you want to transfer and which you’d like to omit.

Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) (Mac):

Carbon Copy Cloner is free, simple to use and backsup only those files and folders that you want it to. Just connect your external hard drive to your Mac, CCC will automatically detect it and off you go. You can also schedule automatic backups at specific times and create disk images with it.

Norton Ghost (PC)

Norton’s Anti-Virus is a nightmare but its backup solution is a much better package. Norton Ghost is probably the closest thing to Time Machine on a PC and backs-up your entire hard drive – or just selected folders – to another partition, networked drive or an external storage device. Norton Ghost can also create an exact copy of your hard drive with all the existing files, programs and settings and provides restoration points.

USB Image Tool (PC)

USB Image Tool is one of the simplest PC backup solutions you’ll find. It’s free, straightforward and automatically detects USB devices connected to your computer and scans them before asking you whether you’d like to create an image backup or restore a previously backed-up image. USB Image Tool can create images of USB memory sticks and MP3 players that are mounted as USB drives.

[Image courtesy of OnSoftware ES]

Håkan Juholt has stepped down as Sweden’s Social Democrat leader just 10 months after taking power. Apart from a minor expenses scandal, the main reason is because of the Social Democrats rapidly diminishing support. After more than half a century of dominance in Swedish politics, Sweden’s Social Democrats have been in terminal decline since they lost the 2008 election. The main reason for this is that over the past 20 years, they have slowly been abandoning the concerns of working Swedes in favor of moving further towards the right and business interests.

The only way to stop this decline is if they elect a leader that returns to the social democratic roots that differentiated them from the right and Reinfeldt’s ruling centre-right Moderate Party. Of course, what’s highly likely is that exactly the opposite will happen. Similar to when UK Labour party leader John Smith died and was replaced by Tony Blair and “New Labour”, the Swedish Social Democrats will refuse to acknowledge the roots of their problems and drift further to the right, putting the nail in the coffin of social democracy in Sweden.

Prime Minister David Cameron has said the UK must “build a better economy” that is fair and worthwhile.

Deputy PM Nick Clegg and Labour leader Ed Miliband have also made speeches on the faults of unrestrained free markets.

But, the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm told Newsnight’s Jeremy Paxman that capitalism was concerned only with growth and making profit, not responsibility.

via BBC News – Newsnight – Capitalism ‘nothing to do with responsibility’.

Yesterday’s big announcement by Apple was the release of iBooks Author and iBooks 2. iBooks Author is a free Mac application and Apple’s attempt at revolutionizing educational books whether they be textbooks, cookbooks, history books, picture books and more for iPad. With it, you can create all of the above and more via a classically easy to use Apple interface. iBooks 2 is the application you need to view publications created in iBooks Author.

To get you started quickly, there are lots of Apple-designed templates that merely require you to add your own text and drag and drop images.

To add interactive photo galleries, movies, Keynote presentations, 3D objects and more, there are simple widgets which make things very easy indeed. The widgets are one of the outstanding features of iBooks Author. They enable you to add everything from a photo gallery to a Keynote (Keynote ’09 v5.1.1 or later) presentation and can be easily identified in your Table of Contents. You can also add a voice-over to make it easier for sight-impaired readers to read your books.

To check how your book is looking, you can preview it on your iPad at any time although note that you’ll need iBooks 2 installed on your iPad to do this. If you don’t like the look or layout of your book, you can easily re-arrange it using the Book Navigator including the possibility of adding a cover and table of contents. In addition, you can import a chapter written in Pages or Microsoft Word and automatically create a portrait view of your book which makes it easier for readers to focus on the text.

The final step is to submit your finished work to the iBookstore and hey presto, you’re a self-published author.

There is one drawback though. Be aware that once you’ve issued it to the iBookstore, the terms and conditions stipulate that you can’t sell it elsewhere. So you wouldn’t be able to sell it on Amazon for example. However, although the exports are in iBook format, you can also export them as PDF files which any e-reader or tablet can read. Whether you would be able to then convert and upload this to Amazon is not clear because presumably iBooks Author inserts some kind of digital protection that prevents this. And presumably, any multimedia elements are excluded from PDF files so the result won’t be as good as if you publish to the iBookstore. Alternatively, you can just export a pure Text version.

The other concern is, if Apple are mainly aiming this at educational institutions, which presumably they are, how many are going to be able to afford iPads for pupils and students. In an era when universities and schools are making unprecedented cutbacks on salaries and resources, it seems hard to imagine where the money would come from unless Apple were willing to heavily subsidize them. That’s not to mention the potential distractions that learning from an iPad would present, especially to kids.

As you’d expect from an Apple application though, iBooks Author is a very stylish and easy to use application. If you’ve ever used Keynote to make a presentation, then you’ll feel very at home with iBooks Author. Overall, iBooks Author is a superb iBook authoring package which produces stunning results with relatively little effort. Note that this initial release of iBooks Author also works on Snow Leopard although it’s likely that support for it will be rapidly phased out.

It also highlights how much luck is involved in football. Fabrègas admits that there were some players in the Barcelona youth system that were better than himself but that never made it into the first time and says that “luck definitely exists in this sport.”

Enjoy and a Bon Nadal a tothom!

Part 1

Part 2

The slightly surprising thing is that Hospitalet only managed to lose 1-0 in the first leg at home in a performance where they more than matched Barcelona for much of the game.

Sitting at the front of Camp Nou, you can actually smell the grass and get within a few meters of the players as you can see when Fàbregas (and before him Xavi) came to take a corner in front of us. We never exchanged pleasantries but you could tell there was a mutual respect between us due to Huddersfield’s recent record breaking 43 match unbeaten run.

One slightly amusing thing about sitting so near to the players is that you hear people in the crowd screaming advice at them. As Xavi shaped-up to take a corner, one man with his wife (and baby incidentally for what was a 10pm kick-off) screamed, “Xavi, don’t just launch it into the area, play it short man!” as if his footballing brain was somehow better than one of the greatest midfielders of all time.

Fabregas taking a corner in front of us. We never got chance to talk.

]]> http://nicholasmead.com/2011/12/23/front-row-at-camp-nou/feed/ 0 admin Fabregas http://nicholasmead.com/2011/12/22/bbc-news-what-really-caused-the-eurozone-crisis/ http://nicholasmead.com/2011/12/22/bbc-news-what-really-caused-the-eurozone-crisis/#comments Thu, 22 Dec 2011 14:22:20 +0000 admin http://nicholasmead.com/?p=2481 ]]>

So what really caused the crisis?

There was a big build-up of debts in Spain and Italy before 2008, but it had nothing to do with governments. Instead it was the private sector – companies and mortgage borrowers – who were taking out loans. Interest rates had fallen to unprecedented lows in southern European countries when they joined the euro. And that encouraged a debt-fuelled boom.

What really caused the eurozone crisis?

There’s a very good straightforward explanation as to the roots of the eurozone crisis on the BBC today emphasizing that it’s mainly the recklessness of private business, not government, that’s to blame. This isn’t a “sovereign debt” crisis as we’re constantly told, it’s quite simply a big business crisis.

For all those pointing the finger at Spain too, it’s also worth noting that up until the start of the financial crisis in 2008, it was the only country to play by the EU’s 3% debt rule – not even Germany complied with it.

BBC News – What really caused the eurozone crisis?.